Broadly speaking, prior art poultry picking machines fall in two general categories. One category is the rotary drum type picking machine which employs a plurality of rotating drums having a plurality of flexible rubber picking fingers extending from the periphery of the drum normal to the drum rotation axis to engage and defeather the poultry passing adjacent thereto. The other type is the disk type picking machine which employs a plurality of rotating disks that mount a plurality of flexible rubber picking fingers thereon extending from the face of the disk generally parallel to the rotation axis of the disk. U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,044,108 and 3,074,103 illustrate the rotary drum type picking machine while U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,197,809; 3,402,424 and 3,483,589 illustrate the disk type picking machine.
While a number of different angular arrangements of the different types of picking machines have been proposed, such picking machines have, by in large, used opposed sets of picking fingers on opposite sides of the path of travel of the poultry through the machine which were of the same general arrangement. In other words, when rotary drum type chicken picking arrangements were used, this same type arrangement was used on opposite sides of the path of travel through the machine and when the disk type picking arrangement was used, this same type arrangement was used on opposite sides of the path of travel of the poultry through the machine. While each of these types of picking machines has certain advantages, they also have accompanying limitations and disadvantages. For instance, a drum type picking arrangement is able to defeather hard to reach areas of the poultry such as the straddle but are usually not able, when used in opposed sets to get full defeathering coverage without damage to the body of the poultry. The disk type arrangement is able to get more coverage of the poultry without damage to the body of the poultry but is usually not able, when used in opposed sets, to defeather the hard to reach areas and is also difficult to feed the poultry through this arrangement. As a result, it has usually been necessary to use a series of different types of machines, some of which were rotary drum type picking machines while others were disk type picking machines in order to effectuate the desired defeathering of the poultry. This has not only caused the equipment cost to remain high for such poultry defeathering operations because of the number of different types of machines required, but further required considerable floor space within the poultry processing plant to make room for the different types of machines.